


Mitigating Circumstances

by high_spring_tide



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 01:23:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19735534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/high_spring_tide/pseuds/high_spring_tide
Summary: Mustang and Hawkeye never intended to get children to join the military. When they realize that's what they've done, they assume they'll be able to keep the Elrics safe without too much trouble. It doesn't work out like that.Working title was "Mustang’s crew sneakily keeping an eye on the Elrics when they were younger."





	Mitigating Circumstances

**Author's Note:**

> The context for this story is that a few days after the Promised Day, Izumi corners Mustang and Hawkeye in the hospital and asks them what the hell they were thinking.

_ “They were eleven and twelve. What. The. Hell,” Izumi says, after the Elrics walk out of the room. Mustang is sure she’s glaring at him.  _

_ “Um. There were. . . “ _

_ “I swear to god, state alchemist, if you say mitigating circumstances--”  _

_ Mustang sighs. Definitely glaring.  _

You have to understand, Mustang and Hawkeye never intended to get a child to join the military or fight their battles. They had been recently returned from Ishval when a clerical error sent them to Resembool, with new scars and fresh nightmares and a renewed determination to live by their convictions. One of those convictions was that there should not be, there must not be any more child soldiers. 

So they had gone to Resembool because of a clerical error, and they had stuck around after seeing the blood-covered transmutation circle in the Elric’s empty house out of a sort of horrified concern. (Neither of them had guessed that the Elric kids had been the ones to attempt human transmutation. If it wasn’t evidence they were actually adults after all, perhaps their teacher had been the one to break the taboo, or perhaps some scoundrel had broken into their house to use their books? In which case, what had become of the children?)

And then finally they had seen the Elrics, and they had known they had to do something. The look in Edward’s eyes. . . it wasn’t just pain, or grief, or guilt, or horror. It was all of those things, but it was also the complete and utter despair that anything could ever get better, that there was any way of carrying on. Mustang and Hawkeye had seen that look too many times before, on the faces of some of the soldiers in Ishval. 

And so Mustang had started to talk to Edward and Alphonse about becoming state alchemists. It had felt ridiculous, and a bit sickening, to be trying to convince another young alchemist that joining the military was the way to achieve his dreams. But what he was saying was correct: if the knowledge to restore the boys’ bodies existed, it would almost certainly be in a private military library. 

He and Hawkeye hadn’t been too worried, at that point, that they were turning the Elrics into child soldiers. Pinako Rockbell explained to them that it would take half a year for Edward to heal enough for surgery, and then it would take several years more for him to recover from the surgery and learn to walk on his new leg and use his new arm. The brothers seemed to have mastered all the alchemical knowledge available to them in their home in the countryside, but to study for the state alchemy exams they’d have to travel, probably to Central. That meant waiting for Edward to recover fully before they could study alchemy further. Several years’ recovery, and then probably another few to prepare for the exams. Edward would be 16 and Alphonse 15 by the time they were ready to take the state alchemy test for the first time. At the earliest. 

Typically, candidates need at least three tries to pass. So 19 and 18 by the time they joined the military, in all likelihood. 

A year later, Edward Elric, at the age of 12, became Amestris’s youngest-ever state alchemist. Alphonse, although not a state alchemist himself, was ready to follow him through everything. Still, Mustang and Hawkeye weren’t too worried yet. Edward had joined the military to conduct esoteric research, not to protect the country’s borders. The brothers were going to be digging through archives, not fighting in wars. 

They didn’t begin to worry too much until an overly-hot afternoon in East City a few months later. There was a labor dispute going on, and a surge in bandit activity, and it looked like the harvest was going to be bad, and Lt. Col. Mustang and his staff were somewhat overwhelmed with work. In fact, Mustang was nearly thirty minutes late for a meeting when Breda put down the message he was reading. “Sir, shouldn’t we be. . . overseeing the Elric brothers? More closely, I mean.”

“Oh, this again,” Mustang said. “I just got through this conversation with Hughes this morning. Yeah, Edward’s young, and technically he is part of the military, but he and Alphonse are just going through libraries and archives and such looking for accounts of the Philosopher’s Stone. They can handle that without babysitting.” 

“Sir, this is from Lt. Bourassa at the Basin Street station. There was a brawl in the market there, which he believes was started by the Elrics as they fled several armed men from the Fitz-Olier gang. Oh, and an overturned vehicle crashed into the steps of the fountain there.”

Everybody in the office stopped and stared at him.

“The boys are fine, and they’re having lunch at the station, apparently, but, well . . . shouldn’t we be overseeing them more closely?”

It turned out Ed and Al  _ had _ been going through a library, and while they hadn’t found anything new about the Philosopher’s stone, they had uncovered some suspicious ledgers, which had led them to a mob family victimizing local dockside workers and their families. The situation ended up being even more of a headache for Mustang than he had first guessed it would be: the boys had also discovered several local officials’ ties to organized crime, and while a few of Mustang’s superiors were impressed by his initiative in fighting corruption, most would strongly prefer he and his subordinantes act only with authorization from now on. One of the implicated officials was a member of the High Command’s wife’s nephew.

Mustang mentally rehearsed and refined a tirade about how stupid and reckless the Elric’s behavior had been. He never used it, though: Hawkeye said it would only make things worse, and he knew she was right. Instead, Hawkeye took the boys aside and told them, at length, how worried they’d all been. Based on their reactions--Ed couldn’t meet her eyes, and Alphonse had seemed to droop--she supposed she’d succeeded in making them regret their behavior. She was less sure she’d succeeded in making them change it. 

Anyway, Mustang and Hawkeye assumed at the time that it had been a one time incident. Researching obscure theory and uncovering a crime ring seemed like too much of a coincidence to be repeated, and anyway, surely being chased by gunmen would be enough to make the boys behave more cautiously in the future. Still, when the Elrics headed up to Awrosut a couple weeks later to go through the Redpath archives, Hawkeye and Rebecca Catalina quietly left for a vacation in the same town. There were no overturned vehicles that time, but it also wasn’t exactly quiet. 

Since it was becoming apparent that they wouldn’t be able to stop the Elrics from heading into danger, Mustang and Hawkeye resolved that at least the boys won’t do it unprotected or unprepared. 

With the first aim in mind, for the next year or so, Mustang sent the squad on covert assignments that basically boiled down to keeping an eye on the Elrics. As the Elrics made their way around Amestris, it was just as well they never noticed the familiar faces who just happen to be drinking coffee in local cafes, or meandering through the markets a block behind them, or shelving books six library stacks away. And, when the trip was deemed particularly dangerous, watching and waiting from the top of a nearby tower. 

They weren’t there to babysit the Elrics, per se. They were just there to be there, in case something happened. The frequent absences certainly made getting work done in Mustang’s office a pain, but on the other hand, the team did get a lot of practice working undercover. That’s always a valuable skill. 

With the second aim in mind, Hawkeye and the rest of the squad used every free moment they had when the boys were in East City to teach them something useful. How to tell when someone is lying. How to tell when someone is carrying a concealed weapon. How to tell when someone is following you. Fuery tried to teach them morse code, insisting its versatility made it invaluable. Havoc taught them how to pack a bag to distribute the weight evenly. Hawkeye wondered whether or not she should offer to teach them to fire a gun, but it was clear the boys were dead set against it, so it was with some relief she decided not to. At least she didn’t have to worry too much about their hand-to-hand combat skills. Unlike many alchemists and desk soldiers she knew, the Elrics practiced hand fighting constantly. 

Over the months and years that followed, Hawkeye and Mustang and the team watched as the boys got better at reading situations, at knowing when to run and when to fight, at working together. And as the boys’ skills improved, they began to trust them more and more to handle situations on their own. At first, someone had secretly followed the Elrics on every trip. Gradually, the team let them manage less-risky journeys alone, and then moderately-risky journeys, and then eventually came a time when no one had followed the Elrics in nearly a year. When they boys went to investigate a potential philosopher’s stone in Liore, they went alone. It’s not that Mustang and Hawkeye thought the boys would stick to research in libraries and archives. It’s that they didn’t think an increasingly powerful religious cult and its revered leader would be too much for the boys to handle. 

Keeping the Elrics out of trouble, keeping them out of danger, keeping them from becoming soldiers or human weapons didn’t just require working around the Elrics’ recklessness, though. It also, at times, meant carefully working around the rest of the military. Not everyone felt the Fullmetal Alchemist’s age should keep him out of combat. Mostly, this just meant refusing requests to temporarily transfer Edward to an active combat unit, which generally wasn’t particularly difficult. Ed had made it clear that he found it insulting that Mustang even informed him of such requests, so convincing the boys not to get involved wasn’t an issue. And Mustang was pretty good at denying requests without stepping on toes. It helped that not much was generally known about the Fullmetal Alchemist’s accomplishments except for wild rumors, and that he didn’t seem to specialize in anything in particular besides being a child prodigy. Most of the officers were happy to request another state alchemist instead. 

Some had been insistent, though. “Because he’s thirteen years old, damn it,” Mustang had yelled at one man who’d been particularly determined to have Edward intervene in a nasty stretch of the trenches along the border with Aerugo. Hawkeye could hear him from where she stood in the hallway and winced, but he recovered well. “I apologize for my tone, Colonel,” he continued a moment later. “But I’ve heard the situation in that region is extremely volatile. Edward Elric is a brilliant alchemist, but he lacks a certain subtlety of judgement that comes with experience, and I fear he could inadvertently destabilize the situation further.” Eventually, Mustang convinced him, though he never managed to completely repair his relationship with that officer. 

A more persistent danger from within the military was curiosity about the Elrics' past. Mustang and Hawkeye grew pretty adept at handling this as well. Hawkeye often succeeded in deflecting questions about the boy’s apparent injuries merely by saying something vague and emotional: “It’s tragic, what those boys have been through,” or “Oh, it’s too heartbreaking. I’m forever amazed by how brave they are.” She would sigh, generally, and smile sadly, and the questioner would usually respect her womanly tenderheartedness and drop the subject. 

Mustang, on the other hand, usually replied with some plausible lie. Or not a lie, actually, but plausible, misleading speculation. “They’ve never told me the full story,” he’d begin, or “while I don’t know for sure,” and then he’d say something undeniably true, like “the civil war was brutal in that region,” or “the mines left in farm country out East after the war are a real problem.” 

“A landmine?” one officer had said, trying to sound sympathetic as well as skeptical. “That would explain the missing limbs, for sure, but the suit of armor?” 

“Injuries from an explosion could have left Alphonse crippled or disfigured. The support of a suit of armor could potentially be used to address both problems,” Mustang replied smoothly. The officer nodded, slowly. 

They thought they’d gotten good at it. They thought they’d had a handle on things. The Elrics had seemed well-equipped to handle even their own uniquely intense form of research, and as the years had passed, interest in both the boys’ mysterious origins and their potential usefulness in combat had seemed to be fading. 

They had been wrong, of course. But by then, all there had been left to do was to have the boys’ backs and fight by their side. 

They’d all survived, by some miracle. And now the Elrics were safe, and headed home. Headed back, perhaps, to some kind of normal life, maybe even to the sort of research done in libraries and archives. Mustang and Hawkeye would worry about them still, even though the challenges they'd face would, hopefully, be much tamer now. And the Rockbells would be there to keep an eye on them, to help them file taxes and make sure they ate vegetables and teach them how to drive. Mustang and Hawkeye would worry about them all the same. 

No, worry wasn't the right word. 

They'd miss them. 

__

**Author's Note:**

> I assume that at some point after this, one of the Elrics casually mentions to Mustang and Hawkeye that their teacher had left them on an uninhabited island for a month as their introduction to alchemy lessons, and then it's Mustang and Hawkeye's turn to be like, What The Hell.
> 
> On tumblr at highspringtide.tumblr.com!


End file.
